Presentation delivered by Professor Geoffrey Beattie, University of Manchester as part of the "Psychology of Persuasion" session at Communicate 2011. Communicate is the annual conference for environmental communicators and is an initiative of the Bristol Natural History Consortium.

1. Professor Geoff Beattie,
School of Psychological Sciences,
The University of Manchester
How to manufacture a
‘green revolution’
(some psychological considerations)

2. What are we facing?
‘The scientific evidence is now
overwhelming
climate change presents very
serious global risks
it demands an urgent global
response’ (Stern Review, 2006)

3. The problem:
‘it’s as individuals that we live our lives and
make our choices…
Now we will have to adapt our choices to
the new realities of the twenty-first century.’
(Walker and King, 2008)

4. The solution?
‘To achieve a mass movement in
green consumption we must
empower everyone – not just the
enlightened or the affluent’.
(Sir Terry Leahy, Tesco, 2007)

5. Easy!
We’re all ready for the green
revolution.
• 70% agree that if there is no change in the
world, we will soon experience a major
environmental crisis.
• 78% say that they are prepared to change their
behaviour to help limit climate change.
• 69% of consumers in China willing to change
their lifestyle to help reduce climate change.

6. Is empowerment working?
• Remote eye tracker to monitor gaze
fixation points as individuals looked at
images of products labelled with carbon
footprint information.

7. Light Bulbs.

8. Gaze fixations.
• Small black mark denotes
where participants are
looking.
• Each gaze fixation scored
every 1/25 sec.).

9. Results
• Some eye gaze was directed at the carbon
footprint of products (e.g. low energy light bulb).
• Little was directed at the carbon footprint of a
carton of orange juice.
• Least visual attention at the carbon footprint of
detergent (interestingly, the product tested with
the highest carbon footprint).

10. But are we really ready?
A lot of assumptions!
1. Consumers are ready to act.
2. They have the right underlying attitude.
3. Conscious (reportable) attitudes are the right
measure.

11. But…
• Everyone knows that green is good.
• Is social desirability influencing the
explicit attitudes?
• Important components of an attitude
might not be available to introspection.

12. So what else can we do?
Measure implicit attitudes.
• Implicit Attitude Test (IAT).
• Computerised classification task (speed and error rate measured).
• How quickly can you associate low or high carbon footprint with the
concept of ‘good’ or ‘bad’?
• Done by assigning items to categories by pressing one of two keys.
• Harder to associate certain categories rather than others.

13. Overall correlation between
explicit and implicit attitudes.
• r = 0.19
• In other words, explicit opinions and implicit
associations are often dissociated.

14. Conclusion.
A familiar foreground
where processing is:
• Conscious
• Controlled
• Reflective
• Intentional
• Slow
A hidden background
where processing is:
• Unconscious
• Automatic
• Impulsive
• Unintended
• Fast
Human mind is divided into two largely independent
subsystems –

15. Measures of implicit attitudes
and the prediction of behaviour.
• IAT is a better predictor of
spontaneous behaviours (especially when
behaviour under cognitive, emotional or time pressure).
(meta-analysis of over 100 studies).
• IAT is a better predictor of behaviour
in sensitive domains where self-
reports are likely to be biased.
(Including racial discrimination, prejudice and environmental issues!).

16. New Results.
• No significant correlation between explicit and
implicit measures.
• Significant number of consumers showed strong
implicit preference for high carbon.
• ‘Green fakers’ identified (strong explicit preference
for low carbon, preference for high carbon or no
preference).

17. How can we identify the
‘green fakers’?
Potentially through their behaviour.
Why would we want to identify them?
They are in a state of ‘cognitive dissonance’
which may well affect their behaviour.

18. By studying speech and gesture,
where imagistic gestures are:
• Spontaneous
• Multi-dimensional
• Meaningful (without the benefit of a lexicon)
• Unconscious (and therefore less open to editorial control)
• Often back-up speech
• Sometimes contradict it!
• These are called gesture-speech mismatches.

19. Gesture-speech match
Implicit/explicit attitude:
convergent
Speech and gesture:
matching
“Yeah if it was like [really
high] and something was
[really low] [and it was the
same product], but there was
a difference in price, then I’d
probably feel really guilty about
[buying the high carbon one]
so [I would buy the low]”

20. Gesture-speech mismatch:
evidence of dissociation?
Implicit/explicit attitude:
divergent
Speech and gesture:
mismatch
“… if they were [next to
each other] and it was
quite obvious that [one
was good] and [one was
bad] then you’d go for
[the good one]”

21. Does this help us predict
behaviour?
Implicit attitude, not explicit attitude,
predicts green ‘consumer choice’ under
time pressure.

22. Do implicit attitudes predict low
carbon choice?
High Carbon Low Carbon

23. Explicit attitudes do not predict this
behaviour.
MeanLikertscore

24. Implicit attitudes do predict this
behaviour (under TP).
MeanDscores

25. Targeting the implicit system
Experimental study.
Systematically manipulated price and CF.
Measured implicit and explicit attitudes to
determine effects on visual attention and
‘salience’ of labels.

27. Results
(i) Mean time spent looking at CF was 12.2% with a range
from 8.8% (low C.F./high price muesli) to 16.2% (low
C.F./low price cake mix).
(ii) Participants spent more time looking at C.F. than they
did at price across the 16 stimuli.
(iii) No relationship between measures of pro-low carbon
implicit attitude and attention to CF information.

28. Encouraging the ‘green
revolution’
• We need to understand that many people have
implicit and explicit attitudes that are dissociated.
• We need to find new ways of identifying them.
• We need to understand the nature of the
dissociation and how it affects people.

29. The ‘green revolution’
• We need to understand how those with
dissociated attitudes process incoming
information.
• We need to find new ways of changing implicit
attitude.
• To empower consumers, we must make the
carbon labelling information appeal to the
implicit system.

30. The ‘green revolution’
• We need to consider the effects of mood on
processing.
• We must build mutual trust in people.
• We must overcome feelings of helplessness.
• We must make consumers feel that we really are
in this together.